Rebuilding After Katrina: Can New Orleans and the Gulf Coast Face the Hard Questions?
Architectural Record, June 2006
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‘Look and leave’ — for good?
As late as the end of April significant parts of New Orleans still lacked fully functioning utilities (and hookup backlogs stretched for weeks). No one in government pressured the parent of power-supplier Entergy to underwrite its bankrupt New Orleans subsidiary so that it could speed the restoration of electricity. Unserved areas remained officially designated “look and leave,” which stalled serious rebuilding and further delayed the return of even those who could face the gruesome cleanup tasks. (Many residents looked and walked away from those lost possessions, leaving behind the X-crossed-circle ideogram spray-painted by searchers in the days after the storm, a few grimly recording the discovery of a body.)
In Holy Cross and New Orleans East, where water faucets only dripped and downed power lines still draped backyards, an eerie quiet remained like a smothering blanket, in contrast to the constant tattoo of hammers heard in most of the city. For literally powerless residents, the lack of services had the same enervating effect as the moratorium they’d fought so hard against.
FEMA withdrew promised funding for the BNOBC planning effort, so the second phase, intended to involve every neighborhood, stopped. The May mayoral election and a lack of FEMA flood-level advisories became excuses for official inaction and private wait-and-see. John Beckman, the WRT partner who led the planning effort, couldn’t understand the lack of urgency. “This is far and away the most complex planning job in country,” he said.
As it happened circumstances made the release of the flood advisories late in April almost a non-event. First of all, FEMA required raising damaged houses only at most three feet or so — much less than many experts anticipated. Secondly, all the volunteer rehabbing created a consensus that even severely flooded, mold-encrusted homes could be restored for far less money than had been estimated immediately after the storm. Perhaps only 3,000 homes out of the 122,000 damaged in New Orleans would have to be torn down. According to Kevin Mercadel, the New Orleans program officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “From a purely structural point of view, a cogent argument can be made that the overwhelming majority of affected homes are less than 50 percent damaged.”
What this means is that relatively few homes would have to be raised to the new flood elevations. That’s short-term good news, because so many more homeowners will be able to afford to rebuild. The bad news is that a high percentage of the housing stock may prove just as vulnerable as it was pre-Katrina.
‘Freelance visioning’
When political support for citywide planning declined, the City council went its own way, authorizing some neighborhoods to start planning on their own. Other neighborhoods with resources brought in their own consultants. But such “freelance visioning” as one local participant called it, left behind “neighborhoods that don’t have access to resources or organizations,” as Beckman explained. Finally state and federal agencies commanded the city to unite behind one planning process and the Rockefeller Fund, a private foundation, helped bridge the funding gap, spurring a reunited effort that began in May.
The neighborhood process, Beckman explained, could address some significant unmet needs: &ledquo;a lack of parks, local convenience stores. People can think about where the center of the neighborhood could be, and deal with trouble spots and abandoned buildings.” Ultimately those plans will have to come to terms with what is possible in a city that’s lost many of its important businesses, where most of its hospitals are out of service, and its school system is in shambles. Circumstances will eventually return the discussion to the politically explosive question of how to physically consolidate a diffuse, shrunken city — a question that’s not only racially charged, but may entail the government taking of private property that in many cases has been a family’s only source of wealth for generations.
Bridging the vision gap
Through a concerted and persistent promotional effort (as well as some success in disaster-preparedness planning after Hurricane Andrew in Florida), architects and planners with a New Urbanist bent have brought the SmartCodes (that control architectural form) and the Transect (a means to recreate traditional gradations of density from city center to rural edge) to towns in Mississippi that have never before regarded planning as particularly useful.
The Congress for the New Urbanism organized charrettes in 11 Mississippi towns only six weeks after the hurricane. In the short term, they dramatically changed the terms of the rebuilding discussion. To Biloxi architect Hardy’s amazement, “The community at large now recognizes the value of what architects do and the importance of good design.” Added Ricky Matthews, publisher of the Gulfport Sun-Herald (which just won a Pulitzer Prize for its Katrina coverage), “The real value of what the they did was to develop a sense of hope in these communities.” That spirit has lasted. “In spite of the fact that people are struggling to get their lives back together I’ve never been in a place where community interest is so high,” added David Perkes, AIA, who has been doing followup planning as director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio formed out of Mississippi State University. “The charrettes got a lot of people in motion if for no other reasons than that they did not want to get left out.”
As months have passed, however, even enthusiasts have a hard time imagining those sketches being turned into real neighborhoods. “The houses they were drawing would be in the $100,000 to $200,000 range,” said Councilman Stallworth. “If that’s the model, all bets are off.” Soft-focus renderings depicted 1920s-style Spanish-colonial casinos (the pre-storm reality resembled oversized highway hotels). Planners sketched a Mediterranean-style fishing village in place of hangarlike fish-processing factories. Perkes, who works with both Stallworth and the East Biloxi Center, explained, “The gap between what’s here and what those plans depict is really big, and for many people it’s hard to bridge that gap.”
The risk of planners promising too much also applied to the unveiling with much media fanfare of a series of Katrina Cottages, which were intended as a dignified and potentially permanent alternative to the much derided FEMA trailers. One model, designed by a team working with Andres Duany, of Coral Gables, Florida-based Duany Plater-Zyberk, was unveiled in severely devastated St. Bernards Parish, southeast of New Orleans. It was made of a water-resistant, insulated-panel system. Duany touted it as deliverable for as little as $70,000, comparable, he said, to costs for installing the much smaller, problem-plagued Katrina trailer. But the independent research that would verify whether this cost was realistic, or that the technologies could be scaled-up to deal with large-scale devastation had not, in fact, been done.
FEMA trailers actually were supposed to cost on the order of $20,000. To the degree they cost more it is because of procurement boondoggling, and Katrina Cottages would not be immune to similar mismanagement. That has not stopped local and national officials from asking the Federal Government to make the cottages an accepted alternative to trailers. If the cottages don’t live up to their promise, they will become yet another example to traumatized residents of hopes dashed.
The Katrina Cottages were privately financed efforts, however, and they laudably opened peoples’ eyes to the fact that the grim and fragile Katrina trailer — the product of a military-style, civil-engineering mindset — need not be the last word in emergency housing. If FEMA was open to outside ideas for improvement, it would be possible to involve a wide spectrum of architects and tenants alike in finding the best form for temporary housing.